By Paul Churchill
The letter from this envelope is missing so I will just tell of a few events that I recall from about this time period.
We were on a patrol going south of the Marble Mountain area when we were approached by several people from one of the villes in the area. They were carrying a crude stretcher with what looked like a body on it. As we got closer I saw that there was indeed a body on it, not quite dead, though not far from it. The villagers were calling out Bac Si, Bac Si. You help? Doc, Doc, You Help). Our patrol held up and I took a closer look and listened for signs of life in this very old woman. She was barely breathing and the death rattle was plain to hear but I thought I will at least try so these people can see that we do care for them. I loaded up two syringes with 1,2 million units of penicillin each and put one in each cheek. The old woman never even flinched. No response whatsoever. I told the villagers we would be somewhere in the area again the next day and that they should bring her out to us again if she pulled through the night. The next day as we patrolled some distance away (not wanting to set a pattern to our route of patrol) the villagers again approached but this time with no stretcher. The old woman was indeed with them walking, I should say almost prancing as she talked, laughed and smiled up at me and bowed in thanks. I gave her another shot for insurance against a relapse and watched in awe as the villagers went on their way. Our overused miracle drugs still worked their miracles in this far away land.
On a night patrol around this time we were moving along the beach of the South China Sea. The tide had gone out and when this happened it would leave a drop off in the sand at the water line anywhere from two to three feet high. This was a good thing because we would get down to the water’s edge and have that couple of feet to protect us a bit if we ran into trouble. Another unique thing about patrolling the beach at night was that as we walked in the wet sand there was some kind of lichen or other sort of sea life that would stick to the soles of our boots and glow a phosphorescent blue that allowed us to spread out much more than we usually could at night. This added a great deal to our safety. On this night this combination probably saved at least a couple of our lives. As we were moving north along the shore two machine guns opened up on us and we immediately hit the deck in the wet sand below the tide wall and none of us were hit, but two guns were still blasting away at us. We started yelling Marines, Marines, cease fire. The Army had set up an ambush on our patrol route and neither of us knew about the other. The leaders of both units had neglected to inform one another of the presence of friendly forces in the area. This came well beyond being danger close to one of the infamous friendly fire events that happen far too often in combat situations when communication breaks down. Fortunately in this instance we were able to get immediate cover and recognizing the sound of M-60 machine guns and seeing red tracer rounds mixed in knew that we were up against friendlies. ( the gooks used green tracers). We chatted a couple of minutes with our Army counterparts radioed the incident in and continued on our patrol without further complications.
Patrolling near this same area during the day we stopped for a break from the 110 plus heat and took refuge in a small grove of trees. As I leaned back against one of them a small child came up, looked at me and decided I must be ok I guess. At any rate this little one crawled up on my lap and started singing “she sells sea shells down by the sea shore” in pretty good English. Needless to say, this kid had me wrapped and for the rest of our break I thought a lot about the kids at home. As we prepared to move out we noticed what looked like a church through some of the trees where we had stopped. As we checked it out we found that there was an orphanage run from an old Catholic Church. There was a French priest and a few Viet Namese Nuns taking care of a bunch of kids. I was able to do a mini sick call after radioing our situation and treated several minor cuts and scratches before we moved on. As I doing this one of the nuns came out with a big tea pot of ice cold, clean water and filled each of our canteens. To top it all off she disappeared again and came back a couple minutes later with an equally chilled can of 7 up for each man on the patrol. Heaven! Sadly we were never to see any of them again as our unit was moved out of this area soon after this patrol.
